I am desperately trying to remember a case in the history of museum management, when a gallery director would turn much-needed exhibition halls into his private studio in order to paint couple of enormous paintings and then present (and accept!) said enormous paintings into the permanent exposition of the gallery. It seems that such a precedent has occurred for the first time in Armenia (correct me if I'm wrong) just a couple of weeks ago, when the National Gallery director Paravon Mirzoyan officially presented his panneux to the gallery and hung them in one of the most visible spots of the entire building - the 4th floor foyer which leads to the halls containing medieval Armenian frescoes.

The event was a cause of derision among the artistic circles, and quite a few attacks in the press (see here). But of course, this comedy of errors pinpoints to fundamental flaws in the management and use of an extraordinary institution that since its foundation in 1921 has bore the flag of Armenian art for over 90 years (the last ten years the flag has been passing from hand to hand and is in a constant state of a limbo).

Not having witnessed the 32 square meter panneu, which reportedly depicts some kind of a synthesis of 'Armenia' (the second, yet to be painted work will depict 'Artsakh') - I can not judge the artistic quality of Mirzoyan's latest opus. However, what astonishes me is the blatant form of self-promotion by the director of the largest art museum in the country. Mirzoyan has always generously given his works to the museum, which is now bursting with examples of his art. I don't need to explain what this 'official' presence in one of the most venerated artistic repositories of the Caucasus signifies for the market value of Mirzoyan's output.

The gallery has gone through many upheavals in recent years. Restructuring of personnel, claims of theft, illegal money-laundering activities, etc... etc... Mirzoyan's reign in the past seven years or so hasn't been entirely unproductive however (as some critics would note). Under his stewardship the museum hosted an increasingly large slate of important exhibitions, acquired a wholly new department of film (essentially a cinematheque run by Melik Karapetian), activated the publication of highly important catalogues which revealed the many riches of the national art collection and finally some long-due renovation and building maintenance work was done to freshen up the gallery and bring into a semblance of a modern museum.

Yet in other, equally important areas the director's vision leaves a lot to be desired... The constant, blatant misuse of gallery's exhibition spaces to hold retrospective exhibition by artists less than worthy of the honour is the most obvious transgression. I will not shy away from naming at least one such artist - Valmar - a widely ridiculed painter of little consequence, who recently had a large one-man show at the gallery. These exhibitions take place with blind disregard of gallery's long-standing policy that it should only hold retrospectives of major, long-established painters (who are usually dead or in very advanced age).

It is no secret that the director has himself used the gallery to hold two retrospectives of his own, publishing a lavish catalogue, the cost of which was subsidised from gallery's coffers. Meanwhile an important exhibition of Minas Avetisyan, which showcased many hitherto unknown works of was relegated to two pathetic rooms and the catalogue barely even registered on the radar with mere 300 copies seeing the light of day.

All this is taking place while the museum has so far failed to note the major jubilee of Armenia's greatest master of modernism - Yervand Kotchar and seems not to have taken any steps yet for the celebration of Vardges Surenyants' 150th anniversary. Surenyants (1860-1921) is one the most significant Armenian artist of the late 19th early 20th century and is still a consistently strong drawcard for the gallery's visitors. His 1907 painting 'Salome' is undoubtedly one of the very few internationally famous works of Armenian art. Hence this major jubilee is one that should have been noted on an unprecedented scale. Despite a proposed plan for these celebrations in the Ministry of culture, there are no signs yet of it taking place.

While Mirzoyan has stated a number of times that the mission of the gallery is "the study and publication of its collections and Armenian art history in general" (see here) - which supposedly excludes any contemporary art - Mirzoyan and co are actively involved in the propagation of the 'master's' oeuvre for nation's benefit.

Working from his almost rural base tacked away in the isolated and ruggedly mountainous town of Sisian in southern Armenia, Ashot Avagyan is somewhat an anomaly in contemporary art today. Unlike most post-structuralist artists who work across different media, Avagian is vehemently against deconstruction and analysis. His elegantly reinterpreted paintings artfully reuse motifs and themes gleaned from Neolithic petroglyphs scattered in the nearby mountains, as well as late medieval folk imagery found primarily in the numerous village graveyards near Sisian. The formal simplicity and aesthetic finesse of these paintings, which is achieved through very careful and premeditated layering of images and colour fields is never tempered with unexpected 'post-modernist' intrusions that would call forth intertextual musing by the viewer. There are no slogans, messages or statements in these works - other than image itself of course. The image becomes an icon, a myth and attains certain 'functionality' (as a device that is much an artwork as it is a blatant signifier/marker/talisman) quite different from the plethora of conceptual painting that is the rage du jour in Armenia today. It is Avagyan's yearly performance pieces however, that truly showcase the breath and ideological depth of the artist's vision. Organically incorporating a stunning variety of elements - from the natural environment, the ancient monuments, costumes, performers, paintings and not the least, the audience - these irreverently experiential and unashamedly ritualistic 'happenings' echo the New York school of performance art only in their subversive methods but are wholly aimed at creating a 'total' experience for the audience who is not asked to 'destroy and erase' but to become a constructive element of whatever process or event the artist chooses to establish a discourse on. His most recent action pieces involved a two-day enactment of his own 'funeral' as well as a highly elaborate performance devoted to the cult of fertility whose 'showpiece' was the starting and stopping of the largest waterfall in Armenia. Birth, death, creation, nature of humanity - the themes are fearlessly direct and perhaps, the artist can be accused of philosophical naiveté in the face of theoretical enquiry. But standing three thousand meters above the sea level in a landscape that has been shaped through millions of years and surrounded by layers of human history, the viewer/participant as led by the magus-like artist is completely unable to attain any kind of critical distance from the work in the process. In order for the 'piece' to work and function, the artist demands total engagement, which is tantamount to enchantment. We may question and deconstruct the performance after it is finished, but by then it has already left an undeniable emotional and spiritual mark. The joy of Avagyan's art lies in his refusal to negate and satirize the themes that feed his work and to allow us a small dimension in which we could indulge in some mythmaking of our own. Vigen Galstyan 2009

HayasArt is not just a blog. It is serious about its commitment to Armenian Art. So serious in fact that we've been collecting it for fifteen years. Among the many quite exceptional artists in the collection, a number of names stand out, simply due to the lack of preconceptions associated with them. One of these is Apresik Aloyan - a name that is as evocative as it is unique and in perfect tandem with the creative personality that it adorns.

Outside a very narrow circle of art lovers, Aloyan's name says absolutely nothing. The artist has rarely exhibited, is not in any major museum collection and lives in almost complete isolation from the artistic circles. It would not be too misleading to describe Aloyan as latter-day hermit, except instead of a cave he has chosen an abandoned factory as his abode and art instead of prayers.

While Yerevan is the undisputed center of Armenian art, an interesting 'clique' of artists actively works in the nearby city of Ejmiatsin - the religious heart of the country - where Aloyan lives. A number of these artists have achieved prominence not only in Armenian art circles but also overseas. But the relative success of painters such as Albert Hakobian and Ayvaz Avoyan is not symptomatic of the general atmosphere of absolute ignorance shown to artists who have chose to live and work outside the artistic capital.

Aloyan's last solo exhibition took place in the now closed Ethnographic museum of Ejmiatsin in 2006. The touchingly bathetic display of awkwardly pasted sheets on paper upon which his tiny paintings were glued upon spoke volumes not only about the artist's dire circumstances but also his irreverent attitude to the reception of his work. This home-made 'exposition' reminded somewhat of a children's room where the walls are hung with the most sincere expressions of introspective thoughts, unhindered as they are by societal constraints, value systems and 'performativity'. The simplicity of artist's subject matter, the directness of his approach and the unclattered purity of his aesthetics has an immediate impact on the viewer, who is not invited to 'deconstruct' but merely to contemplate and indulge in the sweet blue haze that emanate from these works.

It would be ease to relagate these humble works to a merely derivative type of symbolist or expressionist painting, but Aloyan succedes in creating an iconography that attains a timlessness which, like in the works of other great 'outsiders' such as El Greco, De laTour, Pirosmani and Bajbeuk-Melikian functions only according to its own set of rules that are devoid of ties to any specific context and timeframe.

Aloyan's oeuvre consists mainly of imaginary portraits and figurative compositions that conjure up the most delicate, liminal sensations and moments inbetween 'active' thoughts. It is hard to assign any set of concrete emotional states to these wide eyed personages that are strangely familiar and yet disquietingly alien at the same time. The artist never gives the viewer the possibility to 'anchor' his images in any specific reality - he just lets them float in a fog of thin paint, like some kind of a mirage on the brink of dissapearance.

There are no formal or conceptual leaps in Aloyan's painting. He is neither concerned with innovation or commentaries of any sort. In his almost monochrome pallette, rigidly iconoclastic, classicist compositions he has found a voice that (indirectly) echoes many diverse traditions: the Dutch Golden Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Roualt, Kotchar and even Rothko. Yet there is no attempt to emulate or reference anyone, but only to play a new variation of old themes. And what exactly are these themes?

Imbued with palpable mystery that is hauntingly indestructable, Aloyan's paintings are perhaps best read as 'materialised' dream images. It is a world which, much like the one created by Alexander Bajbeuk-Melikian, refutes logic, time and space and where there is merely the joy of being and of sensations, a world that artist desperately wants to escape to and seduces us to follow.

Vigen Galstyan. 2010

Intense colour, monumentality and a strong rootedness in realism have typified Armenian painting for nearly two centuries. Contemporary Armenian artists are fast breaking this mould and throwing a direct challenge to the traditional sources that are still fuelling their art. Ayvaz Avoyan is one of the more interesting “battlers” in this regard. His studio in Ejmiatsin – a converted kindergarten – is strewn with images that are at once familiar yet puzzling. The multitude of heads and figures retain the archaic monumentality of medieval art but they seem to be in a funk – caught forever on the point of transformation.
Counterpoints and contradictions are a constant presence in the best works of Ayvaz Avoyan and generate an escalated feeling of anxiety and suspense. There are no obvious instinctive reflexes when one sees his grotesque-imbued paintings. No fear or disgust, just an impending sense of misapprehension. Something escapes the eye, the first gaze… The viewer is impelled to look further in search of multiple images hidden beneath the surface construction.
To achieve this level of nearly literary depth, Avoyan has travelled a long road through the crossroads of analytical cubism and fauvism, the biomorphic forests of Arshile Gorky and the existentialist angst of William De Kooning. These movements heavily influenced the artist’s earlier period with Gorky being a rather overwhelming presence (symbolic, metaphoric forms strews across abstract landscapes). But in recent years, Avoyan has succeeded in amalgamating these cornerstones of modernist art into a deeply personal mode of neo-expressionist painting.

Many of Avoyan’s portraits distantly echo the 18th century Armenian icons that can be found in Ejmiatsin’s churches. But the artist has bravely replaced the calm spirituality of these archaic saints with a disquieting foreboding. He avoids the prosaic classicism and decorativeness that typifies so much of Armenian contemporary painting inspired by traditional art. By following Gorky’s doctrine in using colour as line, Avoyan creates dynamic membranes of clashing colour schemes that vibrate and transmutate the more one looks at them. The palette is extraordinarily rich and varied, dominated by deep reds and yellows through which shine strokes of emerald green and sienna blue. There are hardly any half-tones here; instead the flat patches of colour are given volume and depth with generous application of pure black and white. One is immediately struck by the harsh intensity of this method and the blinding effect of electric currents running through Avoyan’s paintings makes their optical metamorphosis into a physically exhausting spectacle. There is a sensible depth in the canvases, built not on perspective but careful layering of contrasting surfaces. Hence, even the most abstract of his works acquire a distinct concreteness through lengthy observation. The shapes move into focus and form unexpected associations and visions, which appear like ghostly shadows dissolved in a thick fog of blazing colours. Avoyan does not attempt to transform reality or present thematic signposts in this vast sensory field (most of his work is untitled). Yet one can sense an echo of ancient Armenian iconography here - the reassuring stability of which is under constant threat of disappearance and erasure in Avoyan’s otherwise poetic world.
This relentless probe and questioning of psychological and spiritual meta-narratives is what gives Avoyan’s paintings their profound and distressing power, which lingers on, long after you’ve turned away from their scorching gaze.

Vigen Galstyan - 2008